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habitable worlds, and they tended to be located bothersomely far apart, even for hyper-capable civilizations. Worse, a depressing number of them already had native sapients living on them. Under the Hegemony Constitution, colonizing
those
worlds required Council approval, which wasn’t as easy to come by as it would have been in a more reasonable universe.
    Thikair was well aware that many of the Hegemony’s other member species believed the Shongairi’s “perverted” warlike nature (and even more “perverted” honor codes) explained their readiness to expand through conquest. And to be honest, they had a point, because no Shongair ever born could resist the seduction of the hunt. But the real reason, which was never discussed outside the Empire’s inner councils, was that an existing infrastructure, however crude, made the development of a colony faster and easier. And even more importantly, the . . . acquisition of less advanced but trainable species provided useful increases in the Empire’s labor force. A labor force which—thanks to the Constitution’s namby-pamby emphasis on members’ internal autonomy—could be kept properly in its place on any planet belonging to the Empire.
    And a labor force which was building the sinews of war the Empire would require on the day it told the rest of the Hegemony what it could do with all of its demeaning restrictions.
    That was one reason the Shongairi had been so secretly delighted when the more pacific members of the Council had decided that anyone as bloodthirsty as “humans” deserved whatever happened to them. In fact, Thikair was of thesame opinion as the Emperor’s senior ministers—the majority of the Council members who’d approved KU-197-20’s colonization had seen it as an opportunity to neutralize the humans before they could become a second Shongairi. Better, in their opinion, to have only a single expansionist, bloodthirsty, hyper-aggressive species to deal with. Besides, a lot of them had probably salved their consciences with the reflection that conquest by the Shongairi would at least short-circuit the humans’ almost inevitable self-destruction once they got around to acquiring nuclear capability. Looked at from that perspective, it was actually their moral responsibility to see to it that KU-197-20’s unnaturally twisted development was aborted by an outside force while it was still primitive.
    And if it happened that, in the process of being conquered, the humans should most unfortunately be rendered extinct, well, it wouldn’t be the
Hegemony’s
fault, now would it? No, it would be the fault of those vile, wicked, insanely combative Shongairi,
that’s
whose fault it would be! And however regrettable such an outcome might be, at least the
civilized
races would be spared yet another batch of bloodthirsty deviants.
    But the Shongairi saw humans in rather a different light. The majority of their client races (it would never have done to call them “slaves,” of course) were as thoroughly useless in a military sense as the Hegemony’s more developed herbivores. Most of them weren’t exactly over-blessed with intelligence, either. They could be taught relatively simple tasks, but only three of them could be trained, at least without significant surgical intervention, using the neural educator technology the Hegemony took for granted. And none of them had any of the hunter’s aggressiveness, the drive—the
fire
—that fueled Shongair civilization. Workers and drones, yes, but never
soldiers
. Never warriors. It simply wasn’t in them.
    But the humans, now . . .
They
might have some potential. It was obvious from the survey team’s records that they were hopelessly primitive, and from their abysmal tactics in the single battle the survey team had observed, they were just as hopelessly inept. Still, they were the first species to come the Shongairi’s way who might possibly—with serious long-term training—make useful